THEZA: TeraHertz Exploration and Zooming-in for Astrophysics

Experimental Astronomy Springer Nature 51:3 (2021) 559-594

Authors:

Leonid I Gurvits, Zsolt Paragi, Viviana Casasola, John Conway, Jordy Davelaar, Heino Falcke, Rob Fender, Sándor Frey, Christian M Fromm, Cristina García Miró, Michael A Garrett, Marcello Giroletti, Ciriaco Goddi, José-Luis Gómez, Jeffrey van der Gucht, José Carlos Guirado, Zoltán Haiman, Frank Helmich, Elizabeth Humphreys, Violette Impellizzeri, Michael Kramer, Michael Lindqvist, Hendrik Linz, Elisabetta Liuzzo, Andrei P Lobanov, Yosuke Mizuno, Luciano Rezzolla, Freek Roelofs, Eduardo Ros, Kazi LJ Rygl, Tuomas Savolainen, Karl Schuster, Tiziana Venturi, Martina C Wiedner, J Anton Zensus

Strong detection of the CMB lensing and galaxy weak lensing cross-correlation from ACT-DR4, Planck Legacy, and KiDS-1000

Astronomy & Astrophysics EDP Sciences 649 (2021) A146-A146

Authors:

Naomi Clare Robertson, David Alonso, Joachim Harnois-Déraps, Omar Darwish, Arun Kannawadi, Alexandra Amon, Marika Asgari, Maciej Bilicki, Erminia Calabrese, Steve K Choi, Mark J Devlin, Jo Dunkley, Andrej Dvornik, Thomas Erben, Simone Ferraro, Maria Cristina Fortuna, Catherine Heymans, Hendrik Hildebrandt, Cristóbal Sifón, Suzanne T Staggs, Tilman Tröster, Alexander van Engelen, Edwin Valentijn, Edward J Wollack, Angus H Wright

Abstract:

<jats:p>We measured the cross-correlation between galaxy weak lensing data from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS-1000, DR4) and cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT, DR4) and the <jats:italic>Planck</jats:italic> Legacy survey. We used two samples of source galaxies, selected with photometric redshifts, (0.1 &lt; <jats:italic>z</jats:italic><jats:sub>B</jats:sub> &lt; 1.2) and (1.2 &lt; <jats:italic>z</jats:italic><jats:sub>B</jats:sub> &lt; 2), which produce a combined detection significance of the CMB lensing and weak galaxy lensing cross-spectrum of 7.7<jats:italic>σ</jats:italic>. With the lower redshift galaxy sample, for which the cross-correlation was detected at a significance of 5.3<jats:italic>σ</jats:italic>, we present joint cosmological constraints on the matter density parameter, Ω<jats:sub>m</jats:sub>, and the matter fluctuation amplitude parameter, <jats:italic>σ</jats:italic><jats:sub>8</jats:sub>, marginalising over three nuisance parameters that model our uncertainty in the redshift and shear calibration as well as the intrinsic alignment of galaxies. We find our measurement to be consistent with the best-fitting flat ΛCDM cosmological models from both <jats:italic>Planck</jats:italic> and KiDS-1000. We demonstrate the capacity of CMB weak lensing cross-correlations to set constraints on either the redshift or shear calibration by analysing a previously unused high-redshift KiDS galaxy sample (1.2 &lt; <jats:italic>z</jats:italic><jats:sub>B</jats:sub> &lt; 2), with the cross-correlation detected at a significance of 7<jats:italic>σ</jats:italic>. This analysis provides an independent assessment for the accuracy of redshift measurements in a regime that is challenging to calibrate directly owing to known incompleteness in spectroscopic surveys.</jats:p>

Data compression and covariance matrix inspection: cosmic shear

Physical Review D American Physical Society 103:10 (2021) 103535

Authors:

Tassia Ferreira, Tianqing Zhang, Nianyi Chen, Scott Dodelson

Abstract:

Covariance matrices are among the most difficult pieces of end-to-end cosmological analyses. In principle, for two-point functions, each component involves a four-point function, and the resulting covariance often has hundreds of thousands of elements. We investigate various compression mechanisms capable of vastly reducing the size of the covariance matrix in the context of cosmic shear statistics. This helps identify which of its parts are most crucial to parameter estimation. We start with simple compression methods, by isolating and “removing” 200 modes associated with the lowest eigenvalues, then those with the lowest signal-to-noise ratio, before moving on to more sophisticated schemes like compression at the tomographic level and, finally, with the massively optimized parameter estimation and data compression (MOPED). We find that, while most of these approaches prove useful for a few parameters of interest, like Ωm, the simplest yield a loss of constraining power on the intrinsic alignment (IA) parameters as well as S8. For the case considered—cosmic shear from the first year of data from the Dark Energy Survey—only MOPED was able to replicate the original constraints in the 16-parameter space. Finally, we apply a tolerance test to the elements of the compressed covariance matrix obtained with MOPED and confirm that the IA parameter AIA is the most susceptible to inaccuracies in the covariance matrix.

The growth of density perturbations in the last $\sim$10 billion years from tomographic large-scale structure data

(2021)

Authors:

Carlos García-García, Jaime Ruiz Zapatero, David Alonso, Emilio Bellini, Pedro G Ferreira, Eva-Maria Mueller, Andrina Nicola, Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente

The hybrid radio/X-ray correlation of the black hole transient MAXI J1348-630

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press 505:1 (2021) L58-L63

Authors:

F Carotenuto, S Corbel, E Tremou, Td Russell, A Tzioumis, Rp Fender, Pa Woudt, Se Motta, Jca Miller-Jones, Aj Tetarenko, Gr Sivakoff

Abstract:

Black hole (BH) low mass X-ray binaries in their hard spectral state are found to display two different correlations between the radio emission from the compact jets and the X-ray emission from the inner accretion flow. Here, we present a large data set of quasi-simultaneous radio and X-ray observations of the recently discovered accreting BH MAXI J1348–630 during its 2019/2020 outburst. Our results span almost six orders of magnitude in X-ray luminosity, allowing us to probe the accretion–ejection coupling from the brightest to the faintest phases of the outburst. We find that MAXI J1348–630 belongs to the growing population of outliers at the highest observed luminosities. Interestingly, MAXI J1348–630 deviates from the outlier track at LX ≲ 7 × 1035(D/2.2  kpc)2 erg s−1 and ultimately rejoins the standard track at LX ≃ 1033(D/2.2 kpc)2 erg s−1, displaying a hybrid radio/X-ray correlation, observed only in a handful of sources. However, for MAXI J1348–630 these transitions happen at luminosities much lower than what observed for similar sources (at least an order of magnitude). We discuss the behaviour of MAXI J1348–630 in light of the currently proposed scenarios and highlight the importance of future deep monitorings of hybrid correlation sources, especially close to the transitions and in the low luminosity regime.